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The mythic personality of Trophonios The various versions of the Trophonios myth show an internal consistency not yet recognized : in all of them, the (adolescent ?) hero and his brother Agamedes build enclosed, secret rooms between this life and the nether world. In these rooms, accessible only through a passage theoretically forbidden, divine gifts - oracles, wealth, exceptional fecundity, afterlife - are given, but only to those privileged by the gods. As it turns out, the very same thing happened at the oracle of Trophonios at Lebadeia, whose pilgrims experienced a momentary descent into hell. Furthermore, the brothers' ancestry confirms that they belong to the class of gods and heroes who have as their essential trait the crossing of no-return boundaries.

Carnal Lusts : Lutheran Evangelicalism and Rabelais' Satire of Monasticism Luther's evangelicalism lies on a criticism of the Catholic theology of salvation by works. Every action being sinful, man is to be saved by faith only, a grant of God. Consequently, monastic vows, grounded on the doctrin of works, are abominable sins, all the more dangerous as they take the fallacious appearance of an aspiration to sanctity. To make it clear, the reformer makes use of a striking system of images where monastic works are represented as equivalent to carnal sins : gluttony, lechery. Rabelais, as well as most French Evangelicals, was strongly influenced by Luther. The author aims at showing how the images of revelry and debauchery applied to monasticism in his novels, far from being a joyous praise of earthly pleasures, are ascribable to the same satirical trend.

Between pietism and "Aufklärung". From religious controversy to scientific debate With reference to Martin Gierl's latest book, "Pietismus und Aufklärung" (1997), the article discusses how and under what conditions intellectual debates took place in German-speaking universities in the late seventeenth-early eighteenth centuries, the period between the rise of pietism until the beginning of the Enlightenment. The shift of debates, hitherto restricted confined to specialists, into the public arena, would affect not only how the controversies themselves were conducted but also their very subject matter. Pietism, it can therefore be argued, was less of a reaction against theological arguments "per se" than a call for approaching debates in another way ; and this would in the end have significant consequences for the future development of theology.

Clandestine philosophical literature in eighteenth-century : orientations of the research Over the past few decades, eighteenth-century clandestine philosophical literature has been the object of numerous studies which have led to the revision of a certain number of received ideas in particular as far as the anteriority of the manuscript compared with the printed text and the very notion of authorship are concerned : research is now concentrated more on the circles where the literature originated and on the circulation retworks of the treatises both in manuscript and in printed form. In addition, articles and published papers make it possible to compare and contrast various individual cases and thus to infer diverse forms of clandestine rewriting. Finally, the examination of the philosophical texts themselves allows us to measure the actual scope of Cartesian and Spinozist inspiration in the materialism of the Enlightenment.